Returning to the Edge: Part VII

What's In Yer Wallet?

I promised everyone that I’d keep you up to date during Sprint 1, and I’m pretty close to checking off the box for designing the visual look of the inventory of Planet’s Edge: Fractured Frontier. It’s actually a really useful exercise to start with the U.I. because it makes me think about all the stuff that I have to build for the back end, and also makes me think about how I’ll be organizing all that data.

For longtime fans of the original game, and for those of you have heard me chat in interviews about PE, I’ve admitted that the U.I. for the original game was decidedly…less than optimal. It was functional, but it was not very easy to use, and honestly, I wish we’d put more time and thought in to how we’d implemented it. Granted, it was on par with a lot of other games released around the same time, but redesigning the U.I. has been one of my top priorities for the remake.

WELL…IT WORKED - The original Planet’s Edge inventory system was functional, but it took a lot of clicking around and experimentation to actually understand how to do things. What didn’t help was that all those action buttons that are presented to the left and the right had OTHER buttons that could only be accessed if you held down a key, and it was definitely user vicious rather than user friendly.

One of the first things I had to decide for the redesign was what visual approach to take to the U.I.. If you examine most other sci fi games out there today, they all have pretty much the same interface - a flat, glassy, semi-transparent interface overlaid over the game’s main viewport. This came into vogue about twenty-five years ago when the game industry collectively decided this is now the way. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, and it’s a nice look, but a big reason that choice was made was that it allowed gamers to be more fully immersed in the illusion of the worlds that they were exploring. Secondly, by reducing everything to simple vector lines and curves, it became easier to chop the interface into pieces and rescale it for different screen resolutions. Probably most influentially, it was essential for 3D, first-person, real-time shooters because the ability to see every possible pixel of the environment at all times could be the difference between living or dying in a multiplayer arena. It’s a look that serves the needs of that genre, but I’m going a different way for Planet’s Edge: Fractured Frontier.

In recent months Rhuantavan, who is working on Call of Saregnar (a Betrayal at Krondor-inspired fantasy RPG), has been looking for a designer who can recreate the interface vibe of those old 90s fantasy RPGs. I know he feels, as I do, that we lost something in moving to the invisible interface. A good U.I., when it’s well-designed, is something that not only enables you to play the game, but it’s fun to mess with and it creates a whole other layer of immersiveness to the experience. One of my favorite bits of Krondor was the magic interface designed by John Cutter (who got a nudge from our producer Bob Lindstrom to make it more interesting). The animated symbols added a whole other level of entertainment, and just switching between spells and watching that vector-based morph was hypnotic. It felt magical.

I’ve still got a lot of thought to put into how I make P.E.’s U.I. more engaging and inviting, but at the very least I think I’ve taken the original inventory “blue box” and translated it into something that feels a little more physical, a little more in your face. It’s a somewhat improbable-looking piece of field gear that I could imagine one of our space explorers whipping out of their kit bag. It’s glowy and shiny, and I kind of want one of these in real life.

THAT BRIGHT ENOUGH FOR YOU? In a pinch, you can always use this to find your car keys. On another planet. In another star system.

I started off with this particular piece of the U.I. to handle container inventories, but it quickly evolved into what I’ll use for shop interfaces (which from a data standpoint is just an elaborate kind of container). Beyond helping me establish a general style template for the rest of the U.I., this also means introducing another new element into the game: shopping. There were no shops in the original Planet’s Edge. Despite being a very items-driven, adventure style game, you exclusively got items by completing quests to get the things you needed, or you went completely murder hobo and just killed everything until you found what you needed - not exactly the smartest, or most politic, way to save the Earth when you’re essentially outgunned by everyone else you’re meeting among the stars. That means there will be a whole other layer of gameplay to PE:FF absent from the original, an economics system which will necessarily have to loop into the trading and crafting systems that were already present.

And I’m still only just getting started on this adventure.

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